people – Page 5 – untitled atm

030a – sleep schedules and the need to feel seen

All right! I’m awake at 5pm on a Saturday, well-rested and feeling good after a while. A couple of friends have recommended fixing my sleep-schedule now, and while a little annoying, I do know they have my best interests at heart. Also, the fact that people my age are really swearing by it and thinking it’s something really worth fixing makes me think that it might be time. Physical offices are probably also going to start opening by fall as well, so starting now gives me enough time to potentially fail a couple of times if needed and get back on track.

I realized a few things last night.

I really enjoy long phone conversations so finding some of those people in my time-zone’s going to be important. (Right now I spend a lot of time talking to some of my friends and family back home and for some reason the timing’s been working in a way that it stretches into my night).
Not procrastinating in the day is going to be critical. I really want to make time for hobbies and self-work and making that time in the daytime implies getting done with chores and pending “work” earlier in the morning, especially on the weekends.
Then of course, there’s the 10pm/11pm temptations. The caffeine cravings, for example. I’m going to have to be a little strict about not giving into many of the things I like doing post-dinner. It’s going to have to be wind-down period. Until my body clock adjusts (which, might take a few weeks to a month at least, I guess), I’m going to have to be very deliberate about this.

So, that’s enough on sleep and commitment to that.

(Random update) I bought a mic! I’m excited to figure out a little bit of recording technicalities and then I’ll potentially record some music and experiment around with that.

Lastly, the main thing I’ve been thinking about since yesterday. What is it about “feeling seen” and “feeling known” that feels so good? I would say I was a fairly private person up until two years ago. Eventually, opened up to people and eventually also started to really enjoy sharing my work and my “art” (and therefore more of me) with everyone.

Of course, one of the main things that spurred this into faster action was a breakup, for me. I doubt I ever felt a void when I was with my now ex-partner. Him and some close friends and family having “know” me was quite sufficient. After the breakup, there was definitely that need, that empty space. Savannah Brown (recent discovery) has interesting thoughts on this – she asks if anything really then has meaning unless “people” are involved. Unless “people” are seeing it? I’ve never tried playing music for an animal but I’ve heard it can be quite amazing. So it might not just be people, but maybe.. connection?

Is feeling seen simply an indicator of connection? Or is it the acceptance, the apparent lack of judgement, the freedom that comes from it?

Ah well, looks like there’s clear evolutionary reasoning behind it. This was easy 🙂

Also, very excited to hit 30k soon! Have a happy weekend, everyone. :partyemoji:

029a – platonic intimacy and friendships

We don’t always get what we want. But we get other things. Other things that sometimes end up being silver linings.

I took a somewhat spontaneous weekend trip with few of my friends from grad-school this week. I’d never realized how platonic intimacy has many similar stages like romantic intimacy does. The obvious, tangible things like shared spaces, shared bathrooms and beds. But more than that, the smaller things – the newer fights, some of them caused by unsuspecting jokes, the small adjustments to each others’ habits. Quirks. The privilege of getting to see each others flaws. The vulnerability that comes with telling someone you’re a late sleeper. The vulnerability of being cranky when you haven’t had your day’s coffee. Then there’s the meditative moments when you all sit around someone packing their suitcase on the last night, watch them slowly fold their clothes, one piece after another. You realize how much at peace you all can be, together. Nobody says anything until it’s done and everyone suddenly realizes how magical the moments that just passed had been.

I’m all for virtual friendships and long-distance relationships, but I’m realizing that some dimensions of intimacy can only be achieved by spending actual time with people. I think throughout school and college, some of this happen pretty automatically, since trips and spending time with each other is kind of a default. But as adults, some of us often have to be a bit more deliberate about it. Glad to be able to do it though!

In general, it’s been a great year for friendships for me (of course, being single will do that to you anyway). But I have realized that I’m much more social than I used to think, and it’s been fun to lean into it. Though one new concern that’s come up for me is whether having “more” friends can affect the quality of friendships? (I mean obviously, but I wonder what the numbers are.)
I was definitely a believer of “quality over quantity” earlier, and though I have liked increasing the quantity so far, I don’t want the quality to be affected.

Am I making “enough” friends so that I don’t have to face disappointment when someone is unavailable etc, or do I just genuinely like having that many friends? I think it’s okay when I have multiple friends for different purposes, like enjoying different kinds of activities or when people fill different roles for me, but having multiple friends for similar purposes and roles might be an overkill.

My eventual goal though is to reduce my dependencies on social media and have just enough close friends that I can keep in touch with them and be able to reach them through the older mediums of connectivity. This should provide a good enough upper constraint, I guess.

Anyway, that’s all on this. Onwards.

028b – flights

Adding this picture here since I think it has some interesting things worth noting. I love how it has things related to the pandemic as well as the fact that it’s the pride month – something else I wanted to talk about it in this piece, but didn’t end up getting to. Still worth it, though, I think.

I’m stuck in a five hour flight. Two of the five hours have passed and I’m slowly starting to enjoy it. Had a terrible night since this was a 6 am flight, and why past me thought it’d be feasible is beyond me. Spent the whole night in the “too anxious to fall asleep” and “too sleep-deprived to focus on anything” loop / limbo. But.. I’m here now, and not unhappy nor frustrated. The airport was terribly packed, by the way. In a way I’ve almost never seen before. It’s not completely unexpected since the pandemic is sort of coming to an end here, or at least a pause (who’s to say, really), but still took me a little by surprise.

I was trying to write a little bit earlier too. I was thinking about how it’s been difficult to sit down and focus on writing coherently. I was thinking about how inspiration has been fleeting lately. How it does knock on the door from time to time but flees before I can invite her in. But it’s interesting how a medium-long flight offers exactly the right kind of an environment to focus.

My body is, admittedly, quite uncomfortable, but I’m sure my plight is nothing next to that of the very tall boy sitting next to me who seems incredibly uncomfortable in the middle seat.
This got me thinking about the economics of shared but unequal travel, or in general… shared but unequal experiences. It’s been quite a while since travelers have been able to afford various privileges for an additional cost, but it’s one of the first times I’ve been on the more privileged side. It’s a weird feeling, I didn’t expect so much guilt around it. I wanted to let him know to let me know if he wanted the windows up or down, and for a minute I’d even felt like offering him my seat if it were slightly less uncomfortable. Then I remembered I’d paid more for my seat and there was no reason for me to have to do that. So yeah, the guilt around privilege was and is very real.

Anyway, my time in the States will be coming to end in around 7-8 months. And it’s weird how that changes things so much. I’ve noticed how ever since I got the confirmation of this news my perspective on my remaining time has shifted quite significantly. Every experience feels retrospective even as I’m living it. I was thinking about the people who made the last three and a half years worth recounting. Some of them were people I knew from before I moved, some I met once I got here. So, so happy and content with this last phase of my life. I think I’ve grown a significant amount and learnt so much about myself and what I want from life. Of course, I don’t know whether I would get everything I want or not.. but it’s still nice to feel more aware.

Flights always bring up a lot for me. Something I can’t stop thinking about is the first flight I took when I was moving here. I was seated with another girl similar to me in age, and a married man probably in his 30s. The three of us had ended up talking a lot and having a great time (flights from India to the US are terribly long), – and it just warms my heart to remember that experience. It was such a great welcome to this place, and I’ve always been so grateful to both of them for providing me with that. Hope I can pass that on to someone else at some point.

021a – bridge the gaps through personal conversations

Something new I’ve been realizing is that I’ve been intellectually starved. When you’re not talking to enough people who care about similar things as you do, you can forget that it’s a major part of satisfaction. I spend a lot of time thinking about things like gender, sexuality and mental health, stories and narratives but many people around me don’t. The sad thing about some of these topics like these is that they often come up only personally or when someone seems to be demanding things or pushing an “agenda”. And that’s maybe the unfortunate fact with anything that has a history of stigma associated with it, or a “minority” topic in general. For example, nobody questions anyone talking too much about travel, or money, or grades, or games or real estate or family. These are perfectly acceptable dinner table conversations. And yet, these other things can often be “too heavy” for most people.

Talking to a couple friends yesterday about my personal history with anxiety and my sexuality, I realized that I enjoy talking about these things. But I also realized it doesn’t always have to be in the context of me or my history, I would probably enjoy talking about these things even “generally”. But I had to pave the way for these conversations through my own context. It makes me realize how much of “bridging the gap” might have to be done through personal conversations. Social media can be so loud about all of this in this day and age, and yet perhaps people end up paying attention only when they’re more involved, when they’re almost a bit personally (?) involved.

“Finding your people”, then seems to be an important pillar to keep in mind while navigating life. It takes time to realize how much you’re missing until you find the good stuff. Nilan has posed a nice question that caught my eye recently. What do I want my life to prove? Currently, authenticity is something that I really want to swear strongly by. Right now, I really want my life to prove that living authentically (more than we think we can hope to) has no limits. Calling a spade a spade doesn’t make you socially ignorant, there’s reasons why people don’t do it, and those reasons deserve to be questioned.

And while wanting to live authentically should need no justification, it seems like finding our people would also be 10x easier if we did operate extra authentically all the time?

This also seems to me like a nice spin on vulnerability. What is vulnerability if not simply being authentic? Let’s normalize being authentic. It doesn’t need to be an act of courage. It doesn’t need to be a conscious effort. There’s no limits, and the benefits seem worth it. I don’t think it always needs to happen through social media or the internet but I think these mediums make it easier to reach or find the people we wouldn’t have found as easily in our own limited circles.

Also, one thing I’d like to tell you if you’re someone who’s practicing authenticity but feel like it’s not always reciprocated – keep at it. Often the seeds of such efforts bear fruit only a few months later, but know that there’s always someone who’s noticing it, and getting themselves ready to reciprocate.

006 – reflecting on friendships

I recently met someone new and we got to talking about friendships. (Side-rant: Sometimes I wonder why I like to give context about where a thought came from. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the flow, but at times I feel I also want to credit that person whose company helped give birth to this thought-cloud. If they happen to read it, it might be nice for them to know?)

So anyway, we got to talking about friendships. I’ve been thinking about a friendship that I’m soon going to need to let go of, or at least get some space from, so I brought that up as well. Naturally, a bunch of conflicting feelings around it, the biggest being – how did I end up in a long-term, seemingly close friendship that I don’t really enjoy? I claim to be courageous, honest, direct and brave with many other difficult things, and yet I fuck up this basic thing that seems to come so easily to most people? I didn’t have the answers with me at the time, but I’ve been pondering a little bit and want to see if maybe I do.

Originally, we became friends because of circumstance, and mostly continued to stay friends thanks to circumstance as well. We all have those friends, right? So how does one separate self from a relation like that? I suppose most people form new relationships?

I think I have the answers, these are the some of the factors I wasn’t accounting for when I decided to “continue” a strong relation with that friend.

People’s advice: They didn’t know me, they didn’t know her, they didn’t know the details of our relationship, so they always gave me “bad” (and often unsolicited) advice. And since I was weak (or if I want to be kind to myself, impressionable), I listened.
Potential loneliness: Ah, the dreaded loneliness. The feeling that apparently goes away if you have someone around. Who are these people kidding? How can loneliness go away just because you have someone around? People live in such strong denial – loveless marriages, loveless relations, and I’m so angry that they push all of this on other people. And I regret letting myself fall into these traps of fear.
“Politeness”: AKA my inability to set boundaries. My inability to say no. My own imperfect ideals of perfectionism and kindness. My inability to see that the truth is kinder than any other kindness I might try to bestow upon people.
Lack of awareness: Of course, this seems to be prevalent in most of my posts so far. I only started getting in touch with my feelings around two years ago, and because I’ve always had other (almost objectively) bigger things to tackle, I suppose I wasn’t ready to look at my friendships clearly.

Now, something you might notice (if you for any reason went through some of my other posts) is how often I mention things like human connection and being intentional about the people we spend our time with. I wasn’t always like this. Since I only started becoming aware a while ago, I think it was only around the same time that I began addressing or looking at the things that were missing from my life. I’m not someone who’s ever had a hard time making friends. I used to definitely be introverted as well as shy and reserved, so it definitely took me a while sometimes, but it had always been that way, and it was rarely something that bothered me.

But when I moved to this foreign country that I currently reside in, some of my anxiety (that manifested as really strong body dysmorphia) pretty much hit my “social life” the most. My self-esteem and self-confidence plummeted really hard. What’s the easiest and the most instinctive reaction to anxiety? Avoidance. So I suppressed most of my social needs and wants, and told myself that it’s okay, and that I’ll cope. I did manage to make some really good friends, I did do the bare minimum, but it wasn’t enough. So, for almost 1-2 years, I took the company of whomever it was easiest to spend time with (i.e. whomever I felt least anxious with), as opposed to checking whether I even enjoy their company enough. Whether I would seek their company as much, if I was in my best place.

So, I would often find myself in this place, where I felt like I had a lot of friends and a lot of people I could reach out to, but I often felt terribly lonely. (I know that this is a common sentiment echoed by many people, and @visakanv has talked a lot about this in a lot of his writing as well, but well, let me find out where I’m going with this.)

One of the first life-changing questions my first therapist had asked me, I think basically around 2-3 sessions in, after I’d described a “humans” related situation that was terribly anxiety provoking was something like – “and what do you think, do you feel like your social needs are currently being met?” In all honesty, I cannot describe in words the feeling that floated through me – it started near my head but definitely made its way to my feet (and out, I think) – as I thought about it and slowly uttered the words, “I guess not”.

This was also the first time I’d realized that anxiety by itself was not the problem, the problem was that it was stopping me from doing the things that I wanted to do. This is probably very easy for a third person or a professional to see, but for almost a year and a half, I couldn’t see it, my close friends and family couldn’t see it, my significant other at the time couldn’t see it, and honestly, it still baffles me a little bit. This was the first time I considered a reframe: I didn’t need to stop the anxiety, I needed to continue to do the things that I want to do in spite of it, or even if it comes up.

(I feel the need to apologize that most of my posts end up describing anxiety in some or the other way, regardless of what I start talking about, but of course I don’t need to apologize, so I’ll just throw this out and keep moving on.)

Anyway, a slightly hasty wrap-up. Re-evaluated my needs. Turned out I hadn’t been taking care of my social needs, so I started seeking company more. But anxiety was still a huge factor, so whenever it was hard to meet new people, I’d end up seeking whatever company I could easily get. It was a band-aid solution, and though it had its uses and I’m genuinely very grateful for the company and support I did get, it wasn’t foolproof. In retrospect, I do wish I’d ripped it off sooner. Ah, well.

So, even though it’s been a while that I’ve accepted that human connection is not something I’m going to take for granted, and that it’s surely going to be a pillar for me for years to come, it’s time to address that there’s more to it. Intentionally seeking and building strong, deep and real connections is also going to be a thing. I want to consider giving friendships the same kind of careful consideration that I would give a romantic relationship. I think I’ll be happier. Even if that’s just in their pursuit, of course.

004 – feelings and human connection

Feeling really good about my previous word vomit. I love how it started off as a contemplation of my current work but ended on quite an artsy, floral note. I feel pretty proud of that last paragraph. I do like writing about my thoughts and feelings. I’m feeling a little anxious. I think it’s because I know that I need to go back to my tasks from my day job. The urge to quit is so strong. I feel like I’m Tom from 500 Days of Summer and Software Engineering is my “Greeting Cards”. I’m a perfectly adequate software engineer. I’m looking for what my architecture is, and I’m also looking for my Autumn. But I’m not in a movie, so I’m aware that I might not end up finding these.

My Summer wasn’t as nice as his. My Summer said goodbye over a text. My Summer didn’t offer to be friends. My Summer didn’t stay with me for 500 days, more like 50 if I’m being honest. My Summer wasn’t as clear about things from the start. Though I’m sure I would be in the same place even if she had been. I feel a lot of pain in my chest and my stomach and my heart these days. I think I should quit (work). I think I’ll hand in my notice at the end of this week. There’s so many tasks that I’ll have to think about before I quit. I wouldn’t know how to access half the things. Maybe I need to make a list of them.

I wonder if I should switch teams before trying to quit. I’ll get a temporary relief of a few weeks, at least. I do care about my manager though. I’m worried about breaking the news to him.

Continuing this after around five days. Things have changed a little bit. I got a little bit of family time and outdoors time and time with animals. I decided I might try to talk to a couple of different teams to at least see what’s out there. I might start some medication to help with some of the anxiety. The doctor seems to think it’ll help me cope with the external stressors. The logic makes sense – everyone faces external stresses like work problems, relationship problems, bad days – but the lens of my anxiety makes everything worse. If medication can help me curb the anxiety a bit, I can cope with these problems as a normal human being would. Trying to change the environment and removing external stressors is probably fixing the wrong issue. Of course needing some breathing room is normal, but if I get breathing room then I might be less motivated to start the medication. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes.

I want to get better at connecting with people. I want to become better at being honest and confident and silly at the same time. I know how to get there, but I don’t have enough time and opportunities to practice this. Mainly because of the pandemic.
I feel a bit greedy about this whole thing – what am I looking for? What am I seeking? Is there some other unmet need that I’m confusing with this?

Continuing this after a few hours. I got closer to some of my family this weekend. I like it – one of the nicest things in the world is thinking you know someone and then getting to know them more. Life is so much better when I am intentional about the people I spend my time with. I think sometimes I end up spending a lot of time with people I don’t really like that much – either because of social obligations or because of circumstances. But man that is a terrible way to live.

Anyway, these moments of getting to know someone more. They’re nice moments, moments of unexpected vulnerability, often. Vulnerability that doesn’t necessarily come from the stories these people might be telling me, but from what their voices sounds like when they’re talking about these stories. From whether they meet my eyes while telling me those stories. From the way they smile or from the way their faces move when they’re reacting to my reactions or my questions. From the way they look at another person, if it’s a story that has shared ownership. From the way you can ask a person something but find out more about the person sitting next to them than the original recipient of the question.
It’s a nice little activity, giving someone your full attention and enjoying it – for reasons that are beyond my understanding. Of course one of them is the fact that I get some of it back in return. I’m sure sitting in a park and giving a stranger my full attention from afar isn’t going to be as great.

I’d recently met someone who I could describe as outgoing and friendly and yet not looking to connect. Years ago I would have never known the difference. But I think we finally connected a little today. It was quite nice.

I’m roughly at 800 words here. Reminds me of the time in school where we’d laugh about how we can fill up the word count by rambling on and/or stating the same point in different ways. It’s true, we can. I often used to have a problem with concise writing as well. The number of hours I’ve spent trying to cut down sentences to not cross the word-limit, oh boy. Yet, I find myself out of related thoughts at the moment. Slowly trudging on, trying to get a 100 more words out on this note.
This is nice little fun thing to do – taking ordinary experiences and activities and making stories out of them. I suppose it’s an escape, maybe my ordinary life isn’t fun enough until I make a fantastical story about it. That’s not fully true though – I’m being a little harsh on myself – I’m sure I must have felt moved enough in those moments for thoughts about them to persist hours and days later.